“Careful,” she said under her breath. “Too much character will get you kicked out of this man’s army.”
Opie smiled back, and then they resumed positions, eyes-forward at attention. In a smaller group, this exchange could have gotten them into some trouble, but they were in the middle of the largest collection of citizens any of them had ever been a part of; Jusp couldn’t even see them from the stage.
Commanding the soldiers to check their weapons was the end of the speech anyway. Next came the literal marching orders, as each unit was given an assignment. Assignments were greeted with whoops and hollers from the various units, a time-honored assertion of collective bravado to offset the fact that Sergeant Jusp’s briefing was basically the most terrifying thing any of them had ever heard.
Opie knew a lot of the info already, although this was the first time he’d heard it all at once, and the first time he was forced to think of it from a tactical perspective. It was also probably the first time he thought of himself as one of the people who would have to do something about all of it.
The sub-orbital perimeter went down five days earlier. Opie was one of seven in his family who did full-time soldiering, and included in that seven was a cousin named Dino who worked communications. Dino told him about it that night, two days before the news was made public.
The colony had three perimeters. The first was a series of satellites in low stationary orbit. They were only there to detect any inbound traffic to the planet—be they ships or meteors or whatever—and had no built-in defenses. The satellites were also useful for communication, but less so on Hockspit than on a lot of the other colonized planets, because for the most part, this colony could communicate based on line-of-sight.
The second perimeter was airborne: military whirlybirds and stream riders, mostly. These were armed, and they did regular overpass sorties from one end of the habitable zone to the other so regularly, hardly anyone really noticed them anymore, up until they stopped happening.
Opie and Epic, and everyone else in the room constituted the third perimeter… or they would, once they reached the front line.
The speed with which this all happened took everyone by surprise. According to Dino, the sub-orbital satellites went down all at once, which was basically impossible for a network that stretched completely around the planet. They assumed for the first few hours that it was a natural cosmic event—a solar flare or a particularly impressive gravity wave or a dark energy pulse, maybe; the possibilities were pretty far-reaching. But all of those things would have had a directionality to them, affecting satellites on one side of the planet first, and also likely impacting surface-level equipment.
After a little more work and a lot more math, someone in the tower figured out that Hockspit had been attacked. Something—at least two somethings but probably more—hit the network with a disruption blast from multiple angles at once. This strongly implied an intelligence.
“Derby province,” Epic said.
“What?” Opie asked. He hadn’t been paying attention.
“It’s where we’re going, granite-head. Too early for a nap.”
They started moving as a unit, toward the landing bay to the carrier that would transport them to—apparently—Derby province.
“Not that bad,” he said.
She clapped him on the shoulder, which was painful but also a show of affection in Epic’s world. Opie was tall and gangly, while Epic was smaller and generally more compact, but she packed a lot of muscle in that small frame.
“I swear, Telluride. You’re on the smallest chunk of land in the quadrant and you’re still flunking geography. Derby’s at the edge of the hab zone.”
“South?”
“Western limit.”
“Cold, then, not hot.”
“Temperate. And sure, I guess there are worse places we could be.”
Hockspit was only barely habitable. There was a landmass on the planet that was essentially an enormous steppe, and that was where everyone lived. The weather went from extreme hot to extreme cold and the storm systems were incredibly violent, but on average it was livable for humans. That was the only part of the planet where this was true. There was an ocean that was highly acidic on the west and the east, the south—the equatorial region of the planet—was mostly a lot of lava, and the north was mostly one big chunk of ice.
So there were indeed worse places to be.
They marched double-time until reaching the carrier, up the ramp and into the wide-mouth bay door. All around them, people were talking about what was ahead with a combination of bragging to cover up fear, and out-and-out fear. Because none of them knew what they were in for.
At the surface, the planet’s atmosphere was a little thicker than standard. This meant defining the ‘surface’ as the ground of the plateau on which they all lived, and that was about a mile up from the sea level. It got a lot thinner higher up. The most efficient vertical travel was a whirlybird, until the air got thinner and then a more plane-like design tended to work better. Consequently, the grunts on the carrier were treated to a strangely unpleasant experience.
First, they rose slowly for about forty minutes. Then, quite suddenly and very audibly, the rotors stopped and retracted and the wings deployed. While this was happening nothing was keeping the craft aloft, so they were in free fall. Then, the jets at the rear of the carrier engaged and everyone went from zero gravity to two standards, sideways, in half a second. This was the transition that broke arms and legs and the occasional neck, and invariably made at least a couple of people vomit.
The good news was that it was a smooth flight the rest of the way, as the carrier skipped across the heavier atmosphere beneath it like a round stone on a pond of non-acidic water.
“Well that sucked,” Opie said.
“Always does, soldier,” the guy next to him said.
He turned for a look at the man. He was a lot older than just about everyone else aboard, which made him more interesting than everyone else aboard except maybe for Epic, although Opie was probably biased in that regard.
“You a first gen?” Opie asked.
“Yessir. I’m guessing you’re a third.”
“Second, but I was born on the ride over.”
“A Zee Gee baby full-time soldiering? We really are in trouble.”
He said it lightly, with a smile, but it was the same sort of thing Opie had been hearing in one form or another his whole life. Epic got the same grief for the same reason, and she liked it even less.
There was a myth that children born in zero gravity were too soft and weak for heavy labor. It had to do with the idea that bones only developed properly in an environment with something close to standard gravity. This was sort of true, except colony locals had gravity simulation areas. He learned to walk in one of those spaces. Granted, he didn’t get to experience the gravity of a planet until he was two, but the natural pull on Hockspit was slightly less than one standard. It just didn’t feel that way because the atmosphere was a good deal thicker. He remembered finding the air hard to adjust to, but that was all. He also remembered seeing the sky for the first time, and that was a much nicer memory.
“I’ll make sure I stick by you if something heavy needs lifting,” Opie said.
The man laughed.
“Sure, sure.”
He extended his hand and introduced himself as Koestler.
“Born here, I take it?” Opie asked.
“Builder stock, yes sir.”
Colonies were started by cleaners and builders. Cleaners came first, and mostly worked from ships in low orbit, and just above the surface. Most thankless job in the quadrants, from what Opie had been told. Cleaners spend their lives in space, either above planets that weren’t ready for people yet, or traveling to those planets. They scrubbed atmospheres, cleared land masses and tested for native life.
Builders arrived later, to stand on the planet’s crust and build things. Typically, the biggest buildings and largest land claims
would go first to the descendants of the cleaners, which was only fair. Every now and then a builder would be a second gen cleaner, but that was pretty rare.
“Ever heard of something like this?”
Koestler looked him in the eyes. “No. Nobody has, far as I know.”
He was referring less to what happened to the sub-orbital network than to what happened after that, which was how the rest of the colony was really introduced to the problem now facing them.
A day after the satellites were deactivated by an apparent deliberate attack, the armed sorties that constituted the second perimeter were shot down.
This was especially terrifying for someone sitting in a troop transport flying the same basic pattern as many of those downed airships. They’d all been told that analysis led to the conclusion that the assault on the second line worked because the flights were running on a predictable schedule. This seemed fair provided the weapons that took out the flights were fired from space, because that required predictive targeting, and that only worked if the target followed a consistent pattern. Opie happened to know that was an assumption not fully supported by facts: they hadn’t figured out yet how the second perimeter was actually taken out.
The troop transport was making this jump at a new time, along a path the regular ships never took. Everyone involved still saw this as a huge risk, but it was at least a calculated one.
“Well, this is what we trained for,” Opie said, repeating an oft-stated truism that never sounded all that true.
“True. Makes you wonder though,” the older man said.
“How do you mean?”
“Nobody ever questions training up an army to guard a frontier settlement. That’s just good common sense. But how many generations of us did that without ever facing an enemy? Other than a rogue faction of humanity from time to time? Point is, looks like we got ourselves some aliens, and that’s a first. Sure, we’ve come across xenospecies here and there, but nothing current, right?”
“Current?”
“At the same scale as us. Mostly, it’s bacteria, and maybe some more advanced life forms, with hair and all that. And we’ve found ruins, alien societies who died off before we got there. But you think about it, the universe is big and it’s been around much longer than we have, and it’ll be here long after we’re gone. The odds of us bumping up against aliens who can shoot us out of the sky with weapons that match our technological level, well that’s a pretty small number.”
He leaned in closer, pressed up against the safety belt that was holding him in place.
“At the same time… somebody in the government knew. You don’t build a society on the backs of conscripted military for kicks. You do it because you know someone’s out there.”
They didn’t land in Derby province, because they needed a runway to land and Derby province didn’t have one. There was a maneuver the carrier could have performed, but converting from stream rider back into whirlybird was considerably more challenging than the reverse, because the speed had to be bled off first. It could be done—the craft would essentially commit to a downward spiral in the heavier lower atmosphere, with the wing flaps up to create drag, until it was slow enough to convert to the rotors. The challenge was that it had to be done with precise timing, because if the ship began to fall too fast, the rotors would snap off before engaging. It was scary, anyway, so Opie was glad they weren’t doing that.
What they were doing instead was chute diving from the carrier’s belly. If it meant something that he preferred free falling to the ground over landing on a helipad, he didn’t stop to consider what that something was.
Also, he liked chute drops. In drills, it was the thing he enjoyed the most. If you’re going to live on a planet with a thicker-than-standard atmosphere, parachuting is definitely a pleasant recreational diversion.
It was the middle of the day, which would have been a bad time to drop into a war zone. However, they had significant cloud cover—this part of Hockspit got lots of storms thanks to the natural high/low pressure of the cliff side—and it was only a war zone in a philosophical sense. Nobody was shooting anybody over here, either out of the air or otherwise.
More precisely, nobody was shooting anybody anywhere. After the second round of attacks took out the airborne defense network, there had been no further escalation. That the military higher-ups had elected to deploy troops to certain specific territories suggested they knew something they weren’t sharing, but so far as Opie knew, that something didn’t involve direct engagement with the aliens.
He took in the terrain on the way down. There weren’t a lot of colonists this close to the edge of the habitable zone, so what he saw was mostly hillsides, grasslands, and a few buildings here and there. The military had a weapons cache and general supply fortress buried in one of the hills, but that wasn’t visible from the air. He had the coordinates for it, though; it was the recon point.
He landed on the edge of a livestock paddock. The best farmland in Hockspit was north of this spot, in soil enriched by a pre-colonization volcanic eruption and fed by runoff siphoned from the melting icecaps of the northern pole. The soil was poisoned by the acid Western Ocean, and only certain plants grew naturally. They raised animals here; ones that could survive on an acidic scrub grass diet.
They called these animals cows. Hockspit’s cows were genetically modified specifically for this planet to the degree that one couldn’t breed this animal with a cow from another quadrant’s bovine, and it was highly likely the taste of the animal’s meat varied widely from colony to colony as well. Still, the gene stock was cow, so they were cows.
Opie took to the task of collecting his chute, as he watched Epic float gently to the ground in the field next to his. A couple of the cows on the other side of the fence took a minute to look up from their lunch and moo some additional commentary.
“Storm coming,” she said, as he joined up with her. “Can you smell it?”
“Yeah.” There was ozone in the air, and the clouds were wet.
“Hope everyone gets down before the lightning kicks. I hear it’s bad around these parts. You ever drop during an electrical storm?”
“No, but it sounds like a bad idea. Come on, we’re a few klicks away.”
The skies opened before they reached the recon point.
Epic and Opie grew up in downtown Burkin, the one place on Hockspit that could rightly qualify as a city. It was almost perfectly centered in the middle of the habitable zone, which made it as far as it could possibly be from the lava in the south, the ice in the north, and the acid seas of the east and the west. Aside from the fresh water canals that crisscrossed the landscape, Burkin was fully landlocked. Any storm that made it there—quite a few did—had to pass over the entire landmass first, and since it was an uneven landmass with lots of hills and valleys, city dwellers rarely got the real Hockspit high storm experience.
City storms had weaker winds, and the cloud formations usually relied on internal momentum alone to carry through. In Derby, though, the wind and rain was unforgiving. It was fed with new energy from the sea churn and there wasn’t a lot between the town and the cliffs to cut down the force.
The water was also slightly more acidic than Opie was used to. Nothing that would do them immediate harm, but also not the sort of thing it was good to get in one’s eyes. And it made everything smell like vinegar.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was the lightning.
Most of the bolts reaching the ground were drawn to the lightning rods dotting the landscape. The local cattle farmers used power from the frequent strikes to charge their generators, and also to keep the lightning from doing too much damage elsewhere. The straight-path route to the recon point was full of these, and they knew better than to get too close to one.
Flat, open fields were also probably a bad idea, but on that they had little choice because that described a large portion of the terrain.
“Why do you think they sent us here?”
Epic shouted over the rain, between the thunderclaps.
“Don’t know.”
They were double-timing it together down a path between two farms. Their packs had a spotlight attached to the shoulder piece, which they’d both lit up. It helped keep the road visible in between the lightning flashes, but it was difficult to tell by exactly how much, because it felt like they were running through a strobe.
“I mean, this was a targeted landing, right? They sent a whole squad out here. So what was their intel?”
“I’m not gonna know any more between the times you ask me that,” he said. He was thinking about what Koestler intimated on the ride over, though, about the government maybe working with a lot more information than they were sharing. Distrust of government was a little unusual coming from someone in the military arm of that government, but only a little.
“Just want to know what I’m running toward, lughead,” Epic said.
“My guess is, a warm cot, three squares a day, and a whole lot of nothing.”
She laughed.
“You sound pretty optimistic for cannon fodder.”
“They sent us to the coast,” he said. “Might be the front line. Could also be the back. Maybe the aliens land in Swampscrub and work their way across.”
“Thought you were in this man’s army to shoot some xenos.”
“No ma’am. Three squares and a cot is all I ask for. Plus, what else am I gonna do? Government’s the only one hiring. And I get this cool blaster.”
Up ahead, they could see members of their squad hustling along in similar fashion, in packs of twos and threes. Every now and again a civilian would pop a head out of a window to take in the spectacle, but that was about all. Opie was used to the heavy congestion of the city; he couldn’t imagine a life this isolated. He wondered if the people here even knew to expect soldiers. And if not, what did they think was happening?
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